Martha Stewart Explains Her Drone

“Another thing Stewart is enamored of these days is her drone. ‘It has a little camera. You connect it to your iPhone, and you can control it with your iPhone, and it flies all over my farm and takes pictures,’ she said. ‘It takes wonderful aerial photographs.’ . . . Have the neighbors called the authorities, reporting a U.F.O.? ‘No, I don’t have any neighbors,’ she said, laughing.

I read somewhere that Cubism would never have developed as an artistic school without the invention of the airplane. And that’s why I love my drone: for the new vantage point he gives me. Also, he’s a big hit at parties. At my barbecue on the Fourth, he hovered just inches over Charlie Rose’s head for thirty minutes, did a dive-bomber reconnaissance of Rosie O’Donnell’s iced tea, and then buzzed my nephew’s ear hair. Fun.

When people first hear about my new aerial helper, they usually ask, Couldn’t you just stand on a ladder or your roof to take pictures? Of course I could. I could do a lot of things. But, you know, you get to a certain point with a thirty-year-old, multimillion-dollar lifestyle conglomerate where you think, I don’t care if I handcraft another fucking perforated-tin pie safe ever again. Truly. Remember that great line Oprah supposedly said, “Oprah doesn’t do stairs”? That’s exactly where I am now. Martha doesn’t do ladders.

I studied history at Barnard, so the big picture here is not lost on me. I mean, I’m sure that the first person to own an automobile on his block faced a lot of envy and awkward staring, just as I’m sure that the mass production of butter was looked at askance by those blessed with churns. The thing is, robots and artificial intelligence do not have to be sinister. Everyone thinks “Metropolis” or “Prometheus,” but remember Hal, in “2001”? He had some winning, button-cute characteristics. Sure, he kills those two astronauts and then whacks the other hibernating crew members in their sleep, but we’ve all had that kind of day.

I don’t know why the Mankiewiczes’s house has been vacant for six months now, and I don’t know why the Rogerses’s place won’t sell, and I’ve never really been interested in what’s going on in that orangey ranch house. I can assure you that if I wanted to take pictures of my neighbors, I wouldn’t be doing it on the sly: I’d hire a fabulous photographer and then mise-en-scène it into something really palatable. I mean, I’m not Diane Arbus.

My daughter, Alexis, says that I should Instagram all the photos just to shut everyone up, but do I really need to take that route? Where do we draw the line here? Sometimes in a restaurant I’ll see my waiter’s face reflected on the backside of a soup spoon—should he be able to buy that image or prevent its dissemination? No one was ever in anguish over the rights to the images in Plato’s cave, and not just because of the moss and the smell of urine. In our age, each individual is responsible for knowing that sometimes “N.S.A.” means “No Strings Attached” and sometimes it means “String City.” Figure it out.

But the bigger point here is that robots are the next minority. You can put that trans person from “Orange Is the New Black” on the cover of “Time,” and suddenly a lot of gendered ambiguity feels more attractive and easier to parse, but, when it comes to robots, you really want to know someone who knows one, so that she can model behavior for you. Admittedly, sometimes when I traipse into the former smokehouse on my property where I’m boarding the drone, there’s a tiny tang of Lady Chatterley or “Mandingo” about the whole thing, but that’s just lizardy, collective-unconscious stuff. If robots are truly going to become our companions and helpmeets in the future, we need to get over this sense of them being “other.” My recent dating experiences with gentlemen my age have led me to an important discovery: be grateful for any man who shows up on time and whose rotor is always working.